The victim’s family tried to negotiate compensation with Tesla for 10 months. The attempts failed, so the family went to court.
47-year-old Michael Sheehan from Texas was unable to get out of the Cybertruck after Last year, he drove into a ditch and was hit. His death was horrific and extremely painful: the battery of the electric pickup truck burst into flames at a temperature of 2760°C — enough to shatter bones. The Independent spoke to the family’s lawyer, who worked as an industrial design engineer before becoming a lawyer.
«It was 8 inches [20 cm] shorter than before the burning. This is a thermal fracture. […] It is the most painful and longest torture of all deaths. Whether it’s steam, fire, or electricity, the nerves are literally exposed to it. It’s horrible. If you’ve ever been in a hospital burn unit, you could hear patients begging the doctors to let them die because the pain is so bad,» said C’s lawyer Scott West.
The lawsuit states that on April 25, 2024, Sheehan purchased a brand-new Cybertruck from a Tesla dealership in the Houston suburb of Cypress, Texas. Only 102 days later, he was driving home when the car left the road and hit a large concrete pipe, after which the car’s «hypervolatile» battery system went into «thermal explosion» mode – a chain reaction of short circuits that eventually led to an uncontrollable temperature rise.
It is argued that this collision could have been survived under normal conditions, but the «defectively designed» Cybertruck locked the driver inside.
After the power went out, the driver was unable to open the Cybertruck’s electric doors in the usual way. The exterior door handles also did not work, and the emergency manual door release handles on the Cybertruck «are unreasonably difficult to find in an emergency», the text says. The lawyer says that aesthetics clearly took precedence over functionality when designing the model.
«Not only are you riding [on] 1,325 kilograms of batteries, but the design of this «spacecraft is a double-edged sword,» West said.
The lawsuit insists that Tesla could have chosen to use safer battery cells with slower heat dissipation that are readily available, which would have given passengers more time after accidents. This would not have affected the useful properties of the car, alternative design solutions «would have been both economically and technologically feasible».
It is also argued that Cybertruck «unstable to collisions» due to the proximity of the engines to the battery modules, improper energy-absorbing structures near the batteries, and «failure to account for the movement of components during [the accident]». In addition, Tesla allegedly provides «insufficient warnings or training to passengers on safe exit procedures after an accident».
The lawsuit acknowledges that Michael Sheehan had «some amount of alcohol» in his system, but that this fact would not have led to fatal consequences. According to the plaintiffs, the death was caused by the negligence of Tesla’s designers.
The lawyer recalls that «felt like an idiot when he first got behind the wheel of a Tesla. He couldn’t even immediately figure out how to turn on the car and leave the parking lot, which is why he stayed there for 9 minutes. The lawyer notes that there is always a human error factor, and engineers should have at least taken care of additional driver training if they failed to make the design simpler.
«I’d really like them to get rid of the Tesla Cybertruck business. Here’s my challenge to Elon. Put me out of business. Make these vehicles so safe that I don’t have to do this anymore,» West says.
Three months after Michael Sheehan was killed behind the wheel, three college students in Piedmont, California, also suffered a fatal crash in a Cybertruck that drove off the road and crashed into a tree. Although one of the passengers managed to get out alive, the flames were so intense that rescuers were unable to reach the others. In April, young basketball player Aliyah Arenas, the son of former NBA star Gilbert Arenas, was put into an induced coma due to smoke inhalation after a Cybertruck crashed in Los Angeles. In the lawsuit, Sheehan’s family is seeking unspecified monetary damages, which will be determined by a jury.
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